Wednesday, June 4, 2014

COUNTDOWN TO CASABLANCA—A List of Great WW2 Thrillers & My Attempt to Join the Club

In the movie Patton,
George C. Scott (as George S.) confesses, as he visits the battlefield carnage in
the aftermath of the Allied debacle at the Kasserine Pass, “God help me, I do
love it so!”

On the eve of the 70th anniversary of D-Day, let
me make my own declaration: I love World War II thrillers. Not so much those big
ballyhooed doorstop novels, like James Jones’ From Here to Eternity or Norman Mailer’s Naked and the Dead, or even Herman Wouk’s monumental Winds of War and War and Remembrance.

I also relish the POW escape books (and movies thereof), like
Paul Brickhill’s The Great Escape, Eric
Williams’ The Wooden Horse and P.H.
Reid’s Escape From Colditz.

In recent decades, WW2 special ops and behind-the-lines espionage
tales have been in fine and abundant supply. There’s a gripping handful from Jack
Higgins (or Harry Patterson), including The
Eagle Has Landed (kidnapping Churchill), To Catch a King and The
Valhalla Exchange. And several standouts fromKen Follett, preeminently Eye
of the Needle and Key to Rebecca.

Before turning his considerable talents to the adventures of
Israeli art-restorer and assassin, Gabriel Allon, Daniel Silva produced The Unlikely Spy. Greg Iles’ Black Cross and Spandau Phoenix are both well worth reading.

Many of these titles have apocalyptic “thank God,
it didn’t happen” scenarios, without going the alternative history route of
Robert Harri’s Fatherland (the the
Nazis win!).

Among recent Kindle offerings I’ve particularly enjoyed Jack
Hayes’ adrenaline-charged Blood Red Sea
and Saving Hitler; and, because this
is only an off-the-top-of-my-head list, I welcome readers’ recommendations of other
recent (or not so recent) WW2 thrillers.

You'd be correct in inferring from the foregoing that I’ve
badly wanted to try my hand at this historic thriller genre. But—how to pick a theater
and concoct a plot?

As it turns out, my father Louis Pollock, a screenwriter, had
worked up something suitable, fact-based and fictionally expanded. It involved
German prisoners of war in America. The movie was never made, but I may yet
develop his screenplay into a novel.

In the meantime, even before casting characters or weaving a
plot, I settled on a place and time—North Africa, right after the Allied
landings when Patton was military governor of Morocco.

This
was a brief interlude—two and a half months from the Operation Torch landings in November, 1942, to the Casablanca
Conference in January of ’43—in which “Old Blood ’n’ Guts,” in Ladislas Farago's
phrase, took “time-out of the war to play the role of an American pasha.”

From
all accounts, Patton both gloried in, and agonized over, this delay in
fulfilling his "warrior destiny." From a succession of Moroccan
headquarters, each more sumptuous than the last, Patton reigned briefly as the
modern equivalent of a Roman proconsul. He waded, fearlessly and often
foolishly, into treacherous diplomatic waters, while being feted by the Sultan
and his Grand Vizier and various regional pashas. (The boar hunt with the Pasha
of Marrakesh, which opens Countdown,
actually took place.) More to the critical point, Patton seems to have been
politically seduced by the local Vichy power elite, some of them Nazi sympathizers,
others outright spies.

His
proconsulship climaxed with the assignment to organize a top-secret Allied
summit conference. In the course of ten days in Casablanca, Patton played host
to FDR, Churchill, DeGaulle, Marshall, Eisenhower, Clark, Bradley, Mountbatten,
Montgomery, Alexander, Brooke and others. Characteristically, Patton pulled the
show off with panache—and departed, shortly thereafter, into the Tunisian
desert to commence killing Germans.

But
the legendary general and his exploits hardly require fictionalizing. I only
wanted to appropriate the exotic mise en
scène, with the general appearing as an occasional cometary presence in my
story. With the background in place, I went looking for a protagonist and a suitably
cataclysmic plot.

I
found both ingredients, much to my taste. And now, after a delightful research
trip and a couple of decades of writing and rewriting, editing and re-edting, I’m
even more delighted that the damned thing is done at last.

I
don’t know where, or if at all, Countdown to
Casablanca might fit into the long list of WW2 thrillers. But, in all
modesty, it seems to me that there’s always room for one more.

ORINOCO: "classical escape reading..." --Nelson DeMille

PRECIPICE: “An edge-of-the-seat thriller set in corporate America…”

The sweep of Precipice takes in the elements of a family drama, international intrigue, and an old-fashioned whodunit. The action is brisk and keeps the reader wanting to know what will happen next. . — David L. Sparkman, Associate Editor, Transport Topic